I forgot to link this in my previous comment. YTMND came up with this movie concept back in 2008 (during YTMND’s prime): Hard Safety. Yes, that is the Don LaFontaine you’re hearing. Some friend of his convinced him to do it and it ended up being one of the last things he recorded before he died.

@ Chris Wellons:

That’s sort of exactly what I meant – I think they should have went more SF or less SF for maximum effect. They could make the ending more believable if Kenneth was just a tad bit more technical. Kinda like when you watch the dudes in Primer talk to each other, you go “I have no clue what they are saying, but it sounds like they know their shit”. I guess the problem was that they were doing this really on the cheep and it doesn’t seem like any of the people involved had a degree in physics (or science for that matter). If they bothered to get someone with some experience write convincing time travel techno babble… For example Kenneth could talk about the Novikov self-consistency principle showing he actually did some research on time travel without completely dispelling the “just crazy” possibility. That or somehow figure out how to end it without any SF elements.

But yeah, I agree with your point re: Zuckerberg quote. But I don’t think this is just Hollywood. I think this is most people. Most people don’t actually seem to have that drive to do/build things because it is cool. It’s like when I try to explain to people how open source works, and they just can’t comprehend why someone would spend weeks or months developing something and then post it on the internet for free.

That’s why I imagine Hollywood film-makers always seek to provide characters with these shallow motives for what they do: so that average Joe doesn’t get confused.

Spoilers below.

I finally got around to watching this today. It was better than I expected it to be, but still nothing groundbreaking. Aubrey Plaza and Mark Duplass had great chemistry going on, and Duplass really made Kenneth an enjoyable character. I was disappointed to not see Jeff’s storyline wrap up. After their morning argument, he just left the woman and that was that.

When Kenneth finally reveals his true purpose for going back in time — for a romantic love interest — I couldn’t help but think of this interview with Mark Zuckerberg:

http://youtu.be/1qfcWSZAHvM

[They] frame it as if the whole reason for making Facebook and building something was because I wanted to get girls or wanted to get into some sort of social institution. […] I think it’s such a big disconnect from the way people who make movies think about what we do in Silicon Valley — building stuff. They just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.

Kenneth has to be building a time machine to serve some rather mediocre (by comparison) purpose, rather than because building a time machine would be frickin’ awesome.

You said you wanted to see more scifi elements. I think I’d actually prefer the opposite: no scifi elements at all. The very end of the movie was completely unlike the rest of the move and felt really corny to me. Rather than the time machine being real, I wanted Darius to have to deal with betraying Kenneth — her original purpose was to write an article after all. Also, maybe he was lying about the time machine, but he really did have honest intentions to solve some other crisis. They would resolve their mutual deception and live happily ever after, or something.

If they really insisted on that ending, they should have tied more time travel into it, like actually having notes in the secret tin, or their future selves having subtle influence on the events of the movie.

Just watched this. It was awesome. That is all.

By the way, this is a great hour long interview with the director and Aubrey about the process of making this movie out there. They talk in depth about how the choices the actors made impacted the final product. For example Kenneth was supposed to be much more of a nut, but Duplass wanted to tame him down a bit to make him more genuine and the director went with it.

“…especially in the light of the big reveal later on.”

Ahh, don’t give it away! This is one of those movies where the existence of a twist at the end is itself the twist, and going in with expectations of any genre tropes can only hurt your experience.

Otherwise, I pretty much agree with you. Mark Duplass really pulled off something special here. I can’t imagine it could have been easy to pen or perform a script that treads the thin line between stereotypes and original, sincere characters. I didn’t realize it was a romantic comedy until an hour in, I didn’t realize it was science fiction until the final act. Basically, not knowing what to expect really made this movie.